The Rock River Times They Are A-Changin'

 A few weeks ago I stopped by the offices of the Rock River Times. Illinois requires that anyone registering a Doing Business As (DBA) publish a legal notice in a local newspaper, so I was there on business. Zombie Logic Press had recently become an official Illinois business, and I needed to place the required advertisement. Since I happened to have a copy of Vanished Roads and a press kit with me, I asked if they might be interested in doing a story about the book or the press.

The editor's response was brief and matter-of-fact.

"We don't do much of that anymore."

I don't remember his exact tone, but I remember thinking later that he wasn't brushing me off. He was simply stating a reality. Curious, I picked up a recent issue of the paper, and it confirmed what he had said. The community features, arts coverage, and local profiles that once filled papers like this had become noticeably thinner. It wasn't difficult to see that something had changed.

That moment stayed with me because I couldn't help thinking about Frank Schier.

Frank founded the North End Times, which eventually became the Rock River Times, and I was fortunate enough to know him personally. Frank believed local newspapers existed to chronicle the life of a community. They covered neighborhood businesses, local artists, musicians, civic organizations, and the people trying to build something worthwhile in Rockford. Those stories mattered precisely because nobody else was going to tell them.

Unfortunately, this isn't simply a Rockford story. It's happening across America. Over the last two decades, local newspapers have lost an enormous percentage of their reporting staff. Thousands of newspapers have either closed entirely or operate today with only a fraction of the journalists they once employed. Communities large and small have become what researchers now call "news deserts," places where there simply aren't enough reporters left to cover the life of the town.

Rockford has not been immune to that trend.

The more I thought about my visit, the more I realized the editor's comment wasn't really about my book at all. If there are fewer reporters, there are naturally fewer stories. It's not that local authors suddenly became less interesting. It's that there are fewer people left whose job it is to discover them. The same could be said for local painters, musicians, nonprofit organizations, neighborhood businesses, and countless other people whose work once found its way into the pages of the community newspaper.

That loss extends beyond journalism. It affects memory.

I've spent much of this year digitizing nearly four decades of my own literary archives. As I've worked through boxes of journals, magazines, newspaper clippings, and correspondence, I've discovered just how easily history disappears. Many of the literary journals that published my work in the 1990s have little or no digital presence today. Some survive only in library collections. Others exist only because someone cared enough to keep a copy on a bookshelf. Without those physical artifacts, entire chapters of literary history would simply vanish.

Perhaps that's one reason I've become so committed to building digital archives. Every journal I catalog, every bibliography entry I create, every Internet Archive upload, every Library of Congress record, and every Wikidata page contributes, in its own small way, to preserving a record that might otherwise be lost. If traditional institutions no longer have the resources to document every local story, perhaps those of us creating the work also have a responsibility to preserve it.

I don't blame the Rock River Times for where it finds itself today. The paper is navigating the same economic realities that have reshaped local journalism across the country. Still, I couldn't help thinking about Frank Schier as I walked back to my car. I suspect he would have been saddened by what has happened to local reporting, but I also think he would have understood why preserving our community's stories has become more important than ever.

History doesn't disappear all at once. It fades one untold story at a time. If we care about the history of Rockford—its artists, writers, musicians, businesses, and neighborhoods—we may all have to become a little more intentional about preserving it ourselves.

Putting Young Black Voices Through The Rockford Carwash

When Expression Has Boundaries

Rockford is full of organizations that proudly advertise themselves as champions of marginalized voices. They host poetry workshops, youth arts programs, spoken-word events, mural projects, and leadership initiatives aimed particularly at young people from underserved neighborhoods. The brochures are beautiful. The mission statements are inspiring. They promise to give children a voice.

But there is a question few people seem willing to ask:

A voice to say what?

Because there is a profound difference between encouraging expression and managing it.

Many of these programs celebrate authenticity only so long as that authenticity remains comfortable. Young Black artists are encouraged to write about hope, resilience, community, and overcoming adversity. They are applauded for speaking about diversity and inclusion. But what happens when their art becomes genuinely accusatory? What happens when it names institutions, influential people, or civic leaders? What happens when it expresses anger instead of optimism?

Too often, those voices become inconvenient.

The message is rarely explicit. No one says, "Don't write that."

Instead the lesson is more subtle. Certain poems receive standing ovations. Others receive silence. Certain stories are invited onto stages. Others quietly disappear. Students quickly learn which kinds of expression earn praise, grants, invitations, and publication.

Over time, they aren't simply learning to write.

They're learning which truths are acceptable.

The result is that many arts programs risk producing artists who sound radical while saying remarkably safe things—artists whose work reassures donors, foundations, and civic leaders that progress is being made rather than challenging the structures that continue to produce inequality.

All too often Black children are being used as props and opportunities for photo ops rather than being given legitimate and uncynical platforms where they can freely express themselves. 

Communities need art that unsettles. They need artists willing to ask uncomfortable questions and tell uncomfortable truths, not simply artists who have mastered the approved vocabulary of social justice.

Giving someone a microphone is not the same thing as giving them freedom.

Sometimes the microphone comes with invisible instructions.

Every Town Has Its Own Epstein Files. This Is Rockford's.

 Every town has its own Epstein Files.

This is Rockford’s.

A dead-end art collective.
Missing girls.
Predators protected by people who needed the parties to keep going.
A city where everyone knows everyone, and silence passes hand to hand like a lit cigarette.

In Necromancers Don’t Read Toe Tags, the monsters don’t hide in castles or graveyards.
They hide in galleries, nonprofits, basement shows, city functions, and carefully worded conversations.

The cops are tired.
The artists are compromised.
The victims are inconvenient.
And the dead keep trying to speak anyway.

Some towns bury their secrets.

Rockford fed theirs.

Necromancers Don’t Read Toe Tags
by Thomas L. Vaultonburg

Necromancers Don't Read Toe Tags On Kindle

The Grammar of Silence

 The Grammar of Silence

by Thomas L. Vaultonburg

This essay does not argue that communities fail to recognize harm, nor does it indict individuals for lacking courage at the right moment. It begins from a more uncomfortable premise: that awareness is widespread, diffuse, and structurally unavoidable. In most American communities—schools, art spaces, recovery circles, churches, workplaces—knowledge circulates informally long before it ever becomes official. People hear things. They notice patterns. They adjust their behavior. Boundaries shift quietly. Warnings are transmitted obliquely. What determines whether harm is addressed is not the presence or absence of witnesses, but the mechanisms that govern what witnessing is permitted to become. These mechanisms are rarely malicious. More often, they are framed as kindness, neutrality, professionalism, healing, or pragmatism. Their function is not to protect individual offenders, but to preserve institutional and social continuity—to allow a community to remain legible to itself without confronting the costs of what it knows. The result is not ignorance, but a managed forgetting: a collective practice of absorbing knowledge without acting on it, and of naming that absorption survival.

This framing is often unsatisfying to those most directly harmed, for whom the language of systems can feel like dilution, and equally unwelcome to those whose inaction is named without the relief of villainy. Victims may hear in it an evasion of moral clarity; institutions and bystanders may hear an accusation they cannot easily disown. The discomfort is real, and it is not incidental. A system that relies on silence survives by forcing every participant into an untenable position: to speak is to risk isolation, retaliation, or futility; to remain silent is to become implicated without intent. This essay does not attempt to resolve that bind. It insists only that the bind exists, that it is widely shared, and that the mechanisms which render it tolerable—ambiguity, delay, procedural neutrality, appeals to healing—are themselves part of how harm is allowed to persist without appearing to do so.

As a writer I find it fascinating how language shapes complex social realities, not merely by describing them but by delimiting what can be acknowledged, acted upon, or safely ignored. In institutional settings, harm is rarely denied outright; it is instead translated into a vocabulary that renders it administratively inert. Words such as allegation, concern, misunderstanding, or complicated situation do not clarify events so much as suspend them, relocating urgency into indefinite review. Appeals to neutrality, due process, or healing—terms with legitimate ethical weight—are often repurposed to forestall intervention rather than to guide it. In schools and other bureaucratic environments, this linguistic reframing is reinforced by policy language that privileges risk management over care, reputation over repair. What emerges is not a lie, but a grammar of deferral: a way of speaking that allows institutions to acknowledge harm abstractly while ensuring it never crystallizes into responsibility. Language, in this context, becomes not a medium of truth-telling but a form of infrastructure—quietly load-bearing, widely shared, and largely invisible to those who rely on it.

Once this linguistic reframing is established, it tends to formalize into procedure. Informal concerns are documented, documented concerns are routed, and routed concerns are subjected to review processes that prioritize neutrality over urgency. Each step appears reasonable in isolation, yet their cumulative effect is delay. Responsibility diffuses as matters are reassigned, timelines extend, and decisions are deferred pending further clarification. Over time, the original harm becomes increasingly abstract—reduced to compliance language, policy thresholds, or questions of institutional exposure. Personnel changes accelerate this process: administrators rotate, staff move on, and memory is replaced by files whose language has already been neutralized. What remains is a record that acknowledges something occurred without preserving its moral weight. The system does not deny harm; it absorbs it, converts it into process, and renders it functionally inert. In this way, procedure becomes the final stage of forgetting—not through secrecy, but through orderly management.

This analysis offers no remedy, nor does it propose a corrective framework capable of resolving the conditions it describes. Systems designed to endure are rarely dismantled by insight alone, and language that has been institutionalized cannot be wished back into clarity. To name these mechanisms is not to disable them, but to make them visible—to render legible the ordinary processes by which harm is acknowledged, managed, and ultimately neutralized. If this account unsettles, it is not because it accuses, but because it refuses the comfort of ignorance. What remains, then, is not a call to action, but a condition of awareness: the recognition that forgetting is often procedural, that silence is frequently administered rather than chosen, and that bearing witness does not end when one knows, but when one accepts what knowing has been designed to cost.